The Maltese Herring

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Does it have sadomasochism in it?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Handcuffs? Whips?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nazis?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wizards?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could you put some in?’

  ‘They wouldn’t be relevant in any way whatsoever. If you’d allow me to—’

  ‘You could call the book “The Nazi Wizard”,’ Elsie continued. ‘Big swastika on the front of it. Or a riding crop and velvet-covered handcuffs.’

  ‘It’s about the dissolution of the monasteries.’

  ‘Of course it is. But nobody will know that until after they’ve bought it. It’s all about the cover.’

  ‘The words count for something,’ I said.

  ‘But not as much as the cover,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Well, my book’s to be published by Oxford University Press,’ said Joyner. ‘I doubt they’d have gratuitous swastikas all over it.’

  ‘If I was representing you,’ said Elsie, ‘I promise you they would.’

  Joyner paused thoughtfully. Was he willing to sacrifice the integrity of his book to boost sales? Probably. Did he want an agent as ruthless and lacking in moral principle as Elsie clearly was? Yes, obviously. Still, there were limits.

  ‘There weren’t any Nazis then,’ he said firmly. ‘Not even for marketing purposes. But the story is nonetheless full of trickery and deceit. It concerns the Maltese Madonna – or rather, the Maltese Virgin – and Christ, because there were originally two statues, each about eighteen inches high and, so the story relates, formed out of solid gold and richly encrusted with gems.’

  ‘Also – though I’m just guessing here – maybe made in Malta?’ Elsie asked.

  Joyner smiled. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘they were Byzantine – immensely valuable in their own right, but priceless as objects of veneration.’

  ‘I thought it was just one statue that the Abbey possessed,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, according to the traditional version of the story,’ said Joyner. ‘Which may be wrong in a number of respects. But originally there were certainly two of them. They were seen as guardians of the church in which they resided and of the city of Constantinople as a whole. When the Turks laid siege to Constantinople in April 1453, both statues were paraded around the city to reassure everyone that it could not fall to the invader. But fall it did. Legend has it that the statues were stolen by a Knight of St John, who was present in the encircled and increasingly desperate community. He escaped through the Turkish lines, but at a price. The Turks wanted payment for his safe passage. He kept the Virgin but handed over the statue of Christ. Thus, he escaped unharmed and returned to the knights’ stronghold in Rhodes but, like Judas, he had sold his saviour. That’s when the story of the curse begins. After that betrayal, the remaining statue brought only misfortune on its owners. The Knights of St John were, in their turn, expelled by the Turks from Rhodes and obliged, homeless, to wander from place to place until granted the island of Malta by the Emperor in 1530. Then the statue vanished again. Stolen, according to one account, by “an English friar”.’

  ‘That must have pissed the Knights of St John off,’ said Elsie.

  ‘I think they were pleased to have seen the back of it. Relieved of the curse, they remained happily on Malta, seeing off a major Turkish siege in 1565 and taking part in the naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. They did OK.’

  ‘And it then shows up in Sussex?’ she asked.

  ‘The same year, by some remarkable coincidence, Sidlesham Abbey announced that pilgrims would shortly have the opportunity to venerate a wonderfully bejewelled image of the Virgin. People flocked in large numbers and paid well to see the statue, which the Abbey claimed to have had in its possession for many centuries, but which, tellingly, became known in these parts as the Maltese Madonna. So the locals apparently knew something about its origins.’

  ‘Well, at least somebody finally benefited,’ she said.

  ‘Far from it,’ said Joyner. ‘The curse continued to do its work. Word got back to London of this valuable relic and the King took an interest in it. A great interest. When, a few years later, the visitations of the monasteries began, with an eye to dissolving them and appropriating their wealth, Sidlesham Abbey was amongst the first to receive the King’s commissioners. They demanded to inspect the famous gold Virgin.’

  ‘And the commissioners took it away?’ she asked.

  ‘They never got to see it. The Abbot had claimed that, yet again, it had been stolen. The commissioners did not believe him, but a week of questioning, no sleep and a diet of bread and water did nothing to change his story. Then a local resident, an employee of the Abbey, let slip that a wagon belonging to the Prior of West Wittering had been seen leaving Sidlesham late at night.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the part of the story that is well known here. The Abbot accused the Prior of having stolen some treasure from him and having concealed it at the Priory. The Prior stole it and buried it – or the Abbot was lying and had already buried it at the Abbey to stop the King getting it. In which case the tale of the Prior’s wagon was a carefully constructed red herring to get the commissioners to search in the wrong place. It’s clear that the King wasn’t sure himself which was true. When the two institutions were dissolved, and the buildings and land were sold off to new lay owners, the transfer documents specifically excluded any items of gold found buried on either site. The King wasn’t going to be deprived of the treasure, wherever it was.’

  ‘So who would own the Madonna, if it was found?’ asked Elsie. ‘Legally, I mean.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Joyner. ‘The Knights of St John? The Catholic Church? The Church of England? The Crown? Istanbul City Council? Possession is unlikely to be obtained by anyone who is unprepared for a long legal battle. The person who found the statue might well decide to keep quiet about it. They might also be well advised to unload it as quickly as they could in view of the curse.’

  ‘So, you think it is there to be found?’ I asked.

  Joyner again looked at Elsie and me as if still unsure how much to trust us. ‘In the last few days I have come to believe that it has been discovered already – or something very much like it. I have what you might describe as concrete evidence.’

  ‘So where is it? At Sidlesham or West Wittering?’ I asked.

  Joyner laughed, slightly uneasily. ‘For very obvious reasons, I prefer not to say exactly where it is at this moment.’

  ‘But one or the other,’ said Elsie. ‘After all, you’ve come to Sussex. So that must be a bit of a giveaway, no? If it’s not down here, your visit would seem to be a waste of time.’

  ‘I’ve come to confirm certain things,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ said Elsie, cutting as usual to the chase, ‘if it’s in the possession of somebody down here, all you’d have to do is wait and see who dies a horrible death in the next few days, then move in and search their house.’

  Joyner’s reaction was a sudden coughing fit. He reached out instinctively for his water glass then, on mature reflection, seized an opened bottle by the neck and finally poured himself a glass of wine. His hand trembled slightly as he lifted it to his lips but was steadier by the time he placed the glass back on the table. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, dear lady,’ he said. ‘You don’t get to keep the statue without something happening to you. Something deeply unpleasant and probably fatal. The Maltese Madonna and death go hand in hand.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Elsie

  When you lead an innocent and blameless life, you are rarely troubled by bad dreams, but I had a very strange one that night. Ethelred had come to me, clutching a gold statue of some female, and announced that, since he was now cursed and might shortly meet a horrible end, he wouldn’t be able to complete his next book on time. I immediately got straight onto his publisher, who was very reasonable (this was a dream) and said he c
ould have an extra millennium if he needed it, but only if he abjured the Antichrist. I amended this to ‘take all reasonable steps to abjure the Antichrist’, and said to put it in the contract. But when I went to give Ethelred the good news, he had vanished. The Madonna was still there, tap-dancing on the table, as they so often do in dreams. I awoke to find that the noise was actually a blue tit frantically pecking at its reflection in the window. I told it to piss off back to its nest box and turned over, but sleep evaded me. Even though it was scarcely nine o’clock, I got up. Ethelred was in the garden having breakfast. I told him about my very interesting dream.

  ‘I’ll make you some toast,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t it worry you?’ I asked, as he sliced bread in the traditional manner. ‘You finding the Madonna, then vanishing?’

  ‘No, because it was a dream. Your dream. In my dream I went to the cupboard and there were still some biscuits in it.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I said. ‘I got up and made myself a snack.’

  ‘In what sense is eating a packet of biscuits making yourself something?’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. Everyone knows that opening a packet is cooking.

  ‘Can you manage some toast, then, or are you too full?’ He waved a couple of untoasted slices of bread at me.

  ‘I might be able to squeeze a slice or two down, if you have some Nutella.’

  ‘I’ll check whether you’ve eaten that too, shall I?’

  I paused. Had I eaten his Nutella last night? I didn’t think so. Not all of it, anyway.

  ‘It’s the sea air,’ I said. ‘It makes Nutella evaporate. That’s why you may find you’ve got less than you thought. Not that I know how much you’ve got now. Or had before.’

  Ethelred looked at me with unfounded, or at least unprovable, suspicion. Time to change the subject.

  ‘Where’s Dr Joyner?’ I added. ‘Still asleep? Unlike us early risers.’

  ‘He was up at six,’ he said. ‘Or so he told me when I saw him at seven-thirty. He took a stroll round the garden while it was still cool.’

  I looked at the garden. It was green and had flowers in it. I could see that from here. No need to go round anything to confirm it. And certainly not in the middle of the night. Still, maybe I could pin the Nutella thing on him.

  ‘Early morning walks make you hungry,’ I said with great subtlety.

  Ethelred silently placed a couple of slices of toast in front of me. He wasn’t buying the story. I wondered whether to point out that the toast was slightly charred at the edges.

  ‘You’ll notice a few changes to the garden since you were last in West Wittering,’ he said. There was a hint of pride there that needed some attention before it became an irritating habit.

  ‘It all looks much the same to me,’ I said.

  ‘I planted those roses this spring,’ said Ethelred, pointing at a nearby bed.

  ‘That rose?’ I asked, pointing randomly.

  ‘That’s a peony.’

  ‘So, basically a rose, when you think about it,’ I said.

  ‘They’re nothing like roses,’ said Ethelred. ‘I planted the roses over there. In that new bed.’

  He looked at me in a discontented way. He knew my father had run a fruit and veg stall, and suspected that he had also sold flowers and that I sometimes helped him sell them, all of which was true, but he couldn’t prove it, or not beyond reasonable doubt.

  ‘I like next door’s garden better,’ I said.

  His little face dropped. ‘Phoenix?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that the house next door? The one with the rather glamorous owner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Much better,’ I said. ‘It looks as if they must have spent a lot of time on it, and know a lot about flowers, and are generally very good at gardening as well as at being glamorous. That’s the sort of garden you should be aiming for.’

  ‘I thought my garden was OK,’ said Ethelred. He wisely didn’t even open discussions on the glamour issue.

  ‘It is,’ I said, reassuringly. ‘Just not as good as Phoenix. It’s like your books, Ethelred. They’re OK, but not as good as Ann Cleeves.’

  ‘She writes a different sort of book from mine,’ he said.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘She writes the same thing, only much, much better, so it seems very different.’

  ‘I’ll put some more toast on,’ he said.

  ‘Make sure you don’t burn it this time,’ I said.

  ‘Shall I get Ann Cleeves to make it?’ he asked, with what he may have intended to be sarcasm.

  I shook my head. ‘It would be a complete waste of her time,’ I said.

  Sidlesham Abbey was a bit of a disappointment. I’d hoped for rose windows and flying buttresses, and at least one creepy moment where I felt that the eyes of long-dead monks were watching me in a sinister manner and, obviously, admiring my new shoes. But it was mainly low walls and paths marking where things had once been. Any dead monks would have had difficulty in finding their way around unless they stopped and read the laminated boards showing where the refectory and cloisters had been. They would have found the flower beds a bit naff. It was, in fact, a slightly untidy municipal park with a bit of historic celibacy thrown in as an afterthought.

  ‘The monastery was almost completely demolished in the seventeenth century for building stone,’ said Ethelred. ‘It was given to one of Charles II’s mistresses, who had it knocked down and sold off by the cartload.’

  His friend nodded. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘A lot of houses round this way have got stones in their walls taken from the Abbey.’

  The friend was called Henry Polgreen and he was chair of some obscure committee that looked after the site, and probably the guy that Joyner had previously found unsatisfactory. Ethelred had run into Polgreen shortly after we arrived. They were buddies of sorts. Polgreen was tall and thin, with short grey hair. You’d have said he looked a bit dull and pedantic, had he been standing beside anyone except Ethelred. It was too hot for anything but a T-shirt, but he, like Dr Joyner, was wearing a linen jacket. Ethelred had toyed with the idea of a jacket to keep himself cool, but I’d told him not to be such a dick. I’m always there for my authors, even at the weekend. It’s what he pays me fifteen per cent of gross earnings for. I hadn’t been able to stop him putting on a tie, though.

  Joyner, over on the far side of the site, was pottering around, sweating and carrying the small rucksack I had seen on the train. The rucksack looked quite heavy, but he seemed to think he required it, in the same way Ethelred needed a college tie. It probably contained his ruler, pencil case, and prized collection of conkers. I really felt like a schoolteacher with a party of boys in uniform. Fortunately, I was able to add a little tone to the gathering in a vintage peach linen frock, white straw sunhat and the white patent leather sandals that the dead monks so much envied. I was sure that Ethelred already saw how unreasonable he’d been to complain at the weight of my suitcase. Style like this normally came in a steamer trunk with labels from hotels in Palm Springs and Singapore.

  ‘I think you may have already met my other house guest, Dr Joyner?’ said Ethelred to Polgreen.

  ‘Several times,’ said Polgreen, without enthusiasm. He looked over at the far side of the site, where Joyner was removing his jacket. The day was hotting up. ‘He’s been here a lot, poking around. He must have sent me half a dozen emails about all the things we’re doing wrong. In his view.’

  ‘I think he’d like to excavate here,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Oh, he would,’ said Polgreen bitterly. ‘He’d like it very much indeed. I can promise you that. And he’d like any new discoveries timed to coincide with the publication of his bloody book.’

  ‘Do you, in fact, have any plans for another dig?’ I asked.

  ‘No point, Elsie. The site’s been turned over more times than I can count, starting back in the 1820s. One of the local vicars – the Reverend Sabine Barclay-Wood – managed to do all sorts of damage early last century
, with random and largely undocumented trenches and holes. We did find a few interesting bits and pieces last time we dug – mainly things that the workmen had dropped during the nineteenth-century excavations. There’s a little exhibition of them in the museum hut over there. Some clay pipes and a rusty trowel and some coins and a tin box with a picture of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee on it. Take my word for it, there’s nothing left to find – or not buried treasure, anyway.’

  ‘No Maltese Madonna, so far at least?’ I said, peering over my sunglasses.

  Polgreen sighed wearily. ‘I know more about this site, probably, than anyone in the world. Yes, of course … the Knights of St John, the monks, the theft. But there’s no evidence that the statue venerated here in the 1530s is the same one that was stolen from Malta. The Abbey claimed it was something that they had possessed for years. Unfortunately, the relevant records, carefully preserved by the later owners of the site, all vanished around 1900. They might have shown when and how the statue was acquired, but they’re gone, so we’ll never know how much the Abbot was lying. Sabine Barclay-Wood again, I fear – he was chairman of the preservation committee for a while and transferred most of the paperwork, along with a number of body parts and small items of jewellery, to his vicarage in Selsey, all never to be seen again. As for the statue, whatever it was, its disappearance can be explained in a number of ways. I’m sure all sorts of stuff was taken by the commissioners or by local landowners or by the monks who had been thrown out of the Abbey.’

  ‘I suppose it was tough on the monks,’ I said. ‘Wandering around all day in itchy robes and very unfashionable footwear. Praying, fasting, illuminating. Not having sex. Except possibly with each other. They weren’t trained to do much else. A bit like writers today.’